How can we expect Western society to develop a high culture when Western man views the world as a “rat race,” as “dog eat dog,“ or embraces ideas like “every man for himself?” These Western colloquialisms reflect the Western gestalt and have been reinforced by Western science’s canon that “man” is an animal. And if one believes he is an animal, he will act accordingly. In effect, the West has created a type of societal self-fulfilling prophecy, a pernicious cycle that consistently produces individuals whose actions and motivations encapsulate selfish, undisciplined behavior. It creates materialistic automatons, and the pool from which its leadership arises. Moreover, its leadership consists of those who have excelled in the culture’s values: individualism, competitiveness, militarism, and unscrupulous economic enterprise. Afrikans, on the other hand, possess an entirely different conception of human potential, leadership and power. Afrikan thought teaches that human character and virtue must be developed. The innate potentialities for growth exist but they must be cultivated. Mythologies address this evolved person—he is the cultural hero, the self-mastered man. Persons who achieve this developmental stage will manifest certain decora, discipline, and sense of order. Those having mastered their emotions will comprise the leadership in an Afrikan meritocracy. They exercise authority over society either directly or indirectly and live lives governed by service and self-sacrifice. This conception is totally alien to the West since it has never devised techniques or systems to create self mastered leadership. There’s nothing particularly altruistic or human centered about individualism, competitiveness, militarism, and selfish economic enterprise.

The above ideas are based on Afrikan conceptions, which were totally alien to Marx. His views on private property, class antagonism, and alienation, were concepts germane to Western culture and history but irrelevant to the majority of the world’s cultures. For Marx, similar to the Afrikan concept, the human being was malleable, but with Marx that development was not as guided and definitive as in the Afrikan case, where initiations and various rites of passage are employed. Also, his concept involved one aspect of the self apprehending the other. Thus, there still existed an antagonism within the self, and this is where Marx and Afrikan thought further diverge. Without society establishing cultural institutions that serve to guide human development, we are left with a society that through happenstance, wishes to develop human being but will instead produce overgrown children—automatons, to be exact. You cannot build a high culture with automatons. Marx believes he can build a Socialist society with automatons—it can never happen. Study Kemet and its concept of Maat, then Rome and its concept of imperium—one society was composed of human beings, the other, automatons. One society was based on communalism, the other on slavery.

Western apologists and sympathizers will introduce a Marxian class analysis to explain Western imperialist behavior, contending that the European privileged classes were the culprits and that other European social classes were also victimized. This is true; however, the same worldview and dissociated culture that created the European ruling class produced the same mentality among its masses. The difference is the masses were never afforded the opportunity or lacked the means to execute their wills, but if given the chance they would have acted identically. Thus, it is not a question of class but one of opportunity. Eventually the fruit of “overseas exploitation” benefitted the various social classes of Europe as they all experienced a rise in the standard of living and life expectancy. Europeans bare a collective responsibility and continue to this day to benefit from White supremacy.

As a footnote, if capitalism were truly the culprit, then why were the Romans, the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Aryans, and so many other non-capitalist societies, so despicable? They too were driven by a profit motive, a materialistic worldview, where self-interest is the highest human value. Why did the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China fail in their experiments with Marxism/Socialism? It’s not the “ism,” it’s the worldview that matters. Even with the demise of Capitalism, if the new system that replaces it is based on the same worldview, then we will be left with a "new world" that is just as contemptible as the present one.

And now it is time for my Afrocentricity to come to the forefront. From an Afrikan-centered viewpoint, Western civilization lacks culture; it does not produce human beings. By its own admission, the West views society as an amalgam of highly developed animals competing for goods and services. In terms of culture, two definitions for it exist in the West: the sum total of all societal activities, and the values and mannerisms of the ruling class. Further, there are notions like evolution, survival of the fittest, and progress that each accounts for human development and growth, but none of these approaches the Afrikan conception, which places human consciousness and the integration of the person at the center of human development. Consequently, our thinking cannot be based on Marxism, Shariah law, Judaic law, Roman law, or anyone else’s system of thought. We must return to the science of the soul, formulating cosmologies based on imagination, intuition, reason, and empirical information, and validation through not only mechanical technologies but also through the astral body (the double). The self-order must again be the basis of the world order and we must see the world order in the self. The deities, ancestors, divination, and sacrifice must be reincorporated into life’s experiences. This is our way forward. Not Marxism.

There are still many Afrikan people that are followers of the religion of Marxism. Now, I am not a Marxist, but I have a certain amount of respect for it, and like Marx, I am anti-capitalism. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a by-product of his time. We often like to separate him from his cultural and intellectual environs, which does not allow us to truly assess his philosophic premise and historical backdrop. His thinking captured the minds of millions because it addressed exploitation, human inequity, and offered a solution rooted in activism, and not utopian intellectualism. Marx argued the universe was material in nature, with everything determined by scientific laws of matter. He denied the existence of the personal God of Judeo-Christianity and asserted there will be neither a final judgment nor an afterlife. Consciousness, he argued, does not determine social being, but social being determined consciousness, therefore, man and not God is the active, productive social being who determined his own social realities. For Marx, the human being’s real nature is discovered in the totality of his relations. However, he postulated, social relations are determined by economic activity. Thus, economic laws or economic determinism dictated the political, social, and religious realities that regulated society. Marx equally asserted that society and not God determined morality. Marx, in arguing all of the above, was dealing with concepts and themes that were current or pertinent in Western thought. Various societies, within their own cultural milieu, had already satisfactorily addressed or had avoided altogether these uniquely Western concerns. Thus, these ideas were not “universal” but primarily European concerns. According to Marx, man is alienated from himself and from Nature. In fact, a foundation of Marxist thought, is the Theory of Alienation, which posited that capitalism alienated the human being from his human essence and ultimately from his labor. Presently, the State functions under capitalism, which through industrialization and economic oppression isolates the individual and does not allow him to maximize his potential. Marx sees the development of private property (and specifically the private ownership of the means of production) and the State that formed to protect it, as the source of human alienation. Factory owners (businessmen) alienated people from their labor. Objects we produce are not our own but the “bosses.” Capital (money) reduces social relationship to common commercial denominators. Hence, capitalism perpetuates a society that is against human nature. The fulfillment of human history, according to Marx, means the elimination of and not the reformation of capitalism and the State, a change that entails the nationalization of land, factories, transport, and banks. He proposed a revolutionary political party, the Communist Party, to provide the organization and direction to achieve these ends, and move humanity to the last stage in history, communism, where alienation and oppression end, and the State withers away. Marxist’s Theory of Alienation was inapplicable to probably the vast majority of societies at the time he proposed it. His notions of labor, historical materialism (when implied progress), and private property, were all concepts that were popular in European parlances, but without foundation in many societies, especially Afrikan societies. He developed his ideas in a Eurocentric vacuum, built upon the gospel of mechanistic science, and the newly popularized theories of evolution. In his cultural arrogance, his white supremacist framework and generalizations, it never dawned on Marx that Western’s man worldview and not capitalism, was the source of his alienation. And here lies the problem, which has little to do with class, and more to do with a worldview based on dissonance and dichotomous thought. According to Diop, Europe’s devastating cold during the Ice Age resulted in food scarcity, which bred an adversarial relationship between the human being and Nature. And this is the real source of Western man’s alienation, and not the development of private property, as Marx posits. As a consequence, a materialistic, competitive, insecure, self-centered, violence-prone individual was created, who was determined to conquer and control Nature. This antagonism with Nature created a fractured sense of self, and is the incurable defect of Western civilization. The Western worldview has created a dissociated person, a disjointed being unable to see the inherent unity of life; of the harmony between humans and Nature; spirit (mind) and body; man and woman; energy and matter. All complementary relationships are viewed as opposites or as confrontational. Instead of harmony, the West sees discord. Instead of the whole, it sees the part.

A culture has an implicit worldview. Whether an individual member of a cultural group can consciously or cogently delineate his culture’s worldview, has little to do with whether that worldview exist or not. (Traditionally there are individuals within the culture that know the inner meaning and symbols of their culture and its worldview.) Once while at a meeting, I got into a discussion with a Yoruba sister. I had made a statement saying we need to re-Afrikanize ourselves to re-acculturate ourselves. She reminded me that her culture was still in tact and that she was Yoruba! A second later, she revealed she was a Christian. Not to get into a long polemic, but if you’re Yoruba but you’ve embraced the cosmogony, with an implied worldview of another culture-Judaism, which is in contradistinction to the Yoruba’s, then you have violated the Yoruba worldview, and are culturally-compromised. The Judeo-Christian tradition is based on the Bible, and I have argued in Distorted Truths, that the Bible hides a cunning anti-Afrikanism. The Bible triumphs monotheism, yet Kemet (the country that incubated Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and her people had a complex system of worship that included a Supreme Being, whose powers were departmentalize and executed through various forces, powers or systems; similar to the way that our body is one, a unit, but maintained through a series of systems, i.e., digestive, circulatory, nervous, excretory, etc. Hence, the Bible’s greatest triumph, that of monotheism, violates Afrikan thought. But, this is a superficial or puerile look at what is really happening. What is really happening, is monotheism was an attack on the matrifocal basis of Afrikan society. In Afrikan culture, the Divine was conceived as masculine and feminine, a unity. This conceptualization allowed both men and women to see the Divine in themselves, whereas monotheism, with its one male Deity, is exclusive and denies divine femininity. This would have a devastating effect of the history of women in societies that accepted monotheism. The Bible continues in its anti-Afrikanism through the punishment of Adam after he eats the forbidden fruit—he was forced to become a farmer! This may seem innocuous but this pejorative attitude towards husbandry is reinforced later in the Cain and Abel incident, where the herder kills the farmer. Why is this anti-Afrikan? Because Diop has established that farming or husbandry was the primary economic-cultural paradigm of Afrikan societies, as opposed to herding, which was the primary activity of the people that derived from the Eurasian steppes. This is all coded language that Biblical writers consciously created to establishment themselves and their way of life at the center of creation. The Bible also goes against the grain of Afrikan societies with its stress on sharing and communalism. After Cain kills Abel and God inquires about Abel, Cain retorts, “Am I my brothers’ keeper,” implying that he was not: but in Afrika—YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER’S KEEPER! We see in biblical mythology that the herder and his worldview are victorious time and time again over the farmer. What is my point—which it is impossible to adopt an anti-Afrikan worldview and believe that it has no impact on your culture, even if that view or attitude is subconscious. The best way to avoid such confusion is to return to our worldview. Hey, I trust my ancestors more than I do some European or Arab strangers bearing gifts.